Screen Machine

Feature: MIFF Diary, Day 7 & 8: More thoughts on love, the materiality of film

One has to wonder to what extent Miranda July exists not as a real person but as a fantasy figure, a kind of Frankie Magazine fever dream made flesh. In two films now—Me and You and Everyone We Know and this year’s The Future—Miranda July has cast herself playing for all intents and purposes a constructed version of her real-life persona. How should we put it: A twee, whimsical hipster? If Miranda July really does exists as some aspirational fantasy (and I’m willing to concede this is up for debate) then one has to wonder about the ideals of her demographic. The Miranda July Type is spontaneous (contemptuous of the virtues of routine), childlike and politically naive (lacking in ethical convictions) and paradoxically affected and unaffected at the same time (to keep at bay one’s fear of being on the outside while maintaining the moral high ground of being on the outside). These are apparently the virtues of Generation Y and judging by the squeals of delight every time Miranda July did some spontaneous interpretive dance in her lounge room, they resonated with more than a few people in the audience at MIFF. The Future is both worse and better than her debut feature — It unfortunately doubles down on the magical whimsy (hello talking cat) but is thankfully less trying to be the Statement About American Suburbia that every second American indie film aspires to be.

The most strikingly weird element of The Future is how Miranda July seems to have cast as her love interest someone who pretty much looks like a mirror image of her. Maybe I shouldn’t be all that disturbed because the central relationship of The Future is pretty much the model political correct romantic couple: Two androgynous figures with a kind of sexless relationship exhibiting a perfect equilibrium of power. So in The Future, we find ourselves with this super-cute couple who finish each other’s sentences and think up quirky games for each other, merrily Michael Cera-ing their way through life (why do these Cera Types never laugh?) until they reach an existential crisis. This prompts Miranda July to have a spontaneous love affair with a stranger only to work out that they’re Not Meant To Be Together because he Doesn’t Understand Her i.e. he is understandably weirded out when she wakes in the middle of the night to dress up like a rubber chick and slow dance around the house.

There is obviously something disturbing about this politically correct version of love: The way it obliterates difference. Any conflicts of desire, any disalignments of power are read as infringing on the individual. (Anyone couple who veers from this model, as I found out after a screening of Nicholas Ray’s They Live By Night, stands to be designated as “a little rapey”.) But we should really affirm these instabilities. They are precisely the kinds of terrain that a lover walks upon. That’s why Beauty and the Beast (especially Cocteau’s version) remains one of the very best fairytales about love – Because the two aren’t “meant” for each other. Love is something they need to learn and work upon. Subtle exchanges of power take place and emotional contracts are drawn up so that the two may be happy. This is the reality of love.

Hong Sang-soo’s brilliant Oki’s Movie precisely captures this instability of desire. The film is a variation on many Hong themes: A competition over a woman between an alcoholic young filmmaker and his mentor, a narrative split into distinct episodes each providing a fresh angle on the situation. Oki’s Movie is especially complex for a Hong film, shifting back and forth in time, only once telling us that the episode we are watching is a film within the film’s universe and leaving the rest to our imagination. Oki’s Movie stands out as being the least insistent film of my festival experience, never imposing meaning, freely meandering between moments of pathos, comedy and pathetic honesty as these three characters stumble their way in and out of love. As far as love goes in Oki’s Movie, Hong Sang-soo is always very aware of its lopsidedness.

Hi-So is a Thai film for which I wrote program notes for MIFF which suggests more enthusiasm for the film than I actually felt. In truth, I feel it’s a slightly amateurish film that nonetheless has some interesting ideas in it (and ideas are ultimately where the true value of cinema lies). One of these ideas is how love is not just a coming together of individuals. Because history, commerce and culture live through us, love is also an expression of this. So in a film where a half-Thai has two rocky relationships with a Thai woman and an American, what is dramatised is not just love but how their romantic problems express a specific social milieu.

Can one even call a film as sadistic as Cold Fish a film about love? This film from Sion Sono (whose Guilty of Romance I will be seeing later in the festival) follows a hapless father whose family becomes embroiled in the exploits of a psychotic fish shop owner. The film escalates and escalates, shocking us ceaselessly with the depths of Sono’s nihilism and misanthropy. We could say the film is about the violent hypocrisy of love — maybe not the cheeriest message to send to the audience but something that’s worth hearing every now and again.

These past two days I started my first festival viewings of experimental films with sessions highlighting the work of Peter Tscherkassky and Eve Heller. (See Conall Cash and Adrian Martin’s interview with them here.) ACMI’s curator Kristy Matheson told us before the screenings that these sessions were programmed to “highlight the materiality of film”. On these terms, the programs certainly turned out to be a success especially with the films of Tscherkassky who manipulates film heavily in the dark room, layering images over each other and exposing the sprockets of the film negative. What’s funny about this festival though is how even punters who are avoiding experimental films haven’t been able to be confronted by the materiality of film. I’m talking, of course, about the many projection issues experienced at the festival this year. I know I had a particularly bad experience with the screening of Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon which had constant focusing and framing issues. (I couldn’t help but notice though how un-Ozu-ian the very vocal whinging of the audience was. Where is your capacity to gracefully bear the vicissitudes of life Melbourne?!) But there is also a sense of sadness in these moments and I’m not talking about the sadness of not watching a film with Bluray clarity. I’m talking about the sadness of realising that these moments of out-of-focus images and strange reel changes are not long for this world. Film-going is fast becoming an activity that doesn’t involve film at all but rather digitally projected images. Treasure those moments of projection mishaps people, because they’ll soon be gone!

FILMS WATCHED:

• I Wish I Knew — Jia Zhang-ke
• Peter Tscherkassky Program One
• The Future — Miranda July
• Oki’s Movie — Hong Sang-soo
• Hi-So — Aditya Assarat
• Eve Heller Film Program
• Cold Fish — Sion Sono

PREVIOUS DIARY ENTRIES:

• Day 1: Drinking games, anticipation
• Day 2: On the value of film festivals, love, outcasts
• Day 3: The indignities of employment, the importance of caffeine
• Day 4: On the problem of relating to films
• Day 5 & 6: Man is alone!

Brad Nguyen is a co-editor of Screen Machine. He studied Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, was the film reviewer for Triple R Breakfasters and has written for Senses of Cinema.

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